The order is on the desk: garnishee duties, the statement and the ranking of creditors

On Tuesday, 3 November 2026, a court bailiff serves a garnishment and transfer order on a bakery with eight staff. It concerns the sales assistant Ms Aydin and a claim of 4,200 €. The owner files it with the payroll papers, pays the full wage at the end of November and never replies to the creditor. She has breached two separate duties, and either of them can cost her own money.

Three parties, two commands

A wage garnishment involves three people. The creditor has a claim against an employee who does not pay. In the language of the German Code of Civil Procedure that employee is the debtor. And the employer who owes the employee wages is the third-party debtor, or garnishee, because it is the debtor's own debtor.

What is seized is not the person but the person's claim to wages, and that claim lies against the business. A company with no part in the dispute between creditor and employee thereby becomes an instrument of enforcement. Nobody asks for its consent, and it cannot decline the role either.

Section 829(1) of the Code of Civil Procedure sums up the core of the order in two commands. The court forbids the garnishee to pay the debtor. At the same time it orders the debtor to refrain from disposing of the claim, above all from collecting it. The first command binds the business, the second the employee.

The transfer is the second step, and it decides whom the business pays. Under section 835(1) the garnished claim is transferred to the creditor, at the creditor's choice, either for collection or in lieu of payment at its nominal value. With a transfer for collection, the creditor collects the garnishable part from the employer.

If the transfer is made in lieu of payment, subsection 2 has the claim pass to the creditor, who is treated as satisfied to the extent that it exists. For payroll, little changes day to day: in both variants the garnishable amount goes to the creditor and no longer to the employee.

Where the creditor's enforceable title comes from does not matter to the business. A judgment or an enforcement order from the summary payment procedure leads to the same garnishment order. How a creditor obtains a title in the first place is covered in the course on late payment; this course starts where that one ends.

The employer therefore does not examine whether the claim is justified. It checks whether an order has been served on it, against whom it is directed and which wage claim it covers. Objections to the claim itself are a matter for the employee, not for the business, which merely holds the till between the parties.

The law expressly protects the garnishee in this position. Under section 836(2), the transfer order is deemed valid in the garnishee's favour as against the debtor, even if it was wrongly issued. That remains so until the order is set aside and the garnishee learns of the setting aside.

In practice this means that what the business pays to the creditor under the order cannot be claimed a second time by the employee, even if she asserts that the debt was settled long ago. Only a setting aside that the business learns of ends this protection. A phone call with a bare assertion is not enough.

When the order takes effect and how far it reaches

A single event is decisive. Under section 829(3) of the Code of Civil Procedure the garnishment is effected once the order is served on the garnishee. Not the day the court decides, and not the day the employee hears of it, but the day the document reaches the employer.

Service is arranged by the creditor; section 829(2) expressly gives the creditor that task. The bailiff then immediately serves the order on the debtor as well, together with the proof of service. The employee therefore usually learns that her wages have been garnished only after her employer does.

From that moment, every payment of the garnishable part to the employee is a payment to the wrong person. The prohibition on payment is addressed to the business. If it still pays out in full, it risks having to pay the same amount a second time to the creditor, and one wage payment turns into two.

A single service is enough for all future wages. Section 832 of the Code of Civil Procedure extends the lien on a salary claim or a similar recurring claim to the amounts falling due after the garnishment. The order therefore keeps working month after month, without the creditor having to arrange a new service each time.

Changes in the employment relationship do not make it lapse either. Under section 833(1) the garnishment also covers income the debtor receives after a transfer to another post, the assignment of a new role or a pay rise. A pay rise agreed after service therefore normally enlarges the garnishable part at the same time.

Subsection 2 closes an obvious detour. If the employment ends and debtor and garnishee enter into a new one within nine months, the garnishment extends to the wage claim under the new relationship. Dismissing and shortly afterwards re-hiring the employee does not release the business from the old order.

Nor does it help to make the wage look smaller. Section 850h treats two arrangements as disguised employment income. The first is paying the remuneration to a third party, such as a relative. The second is ongoing work for no remuneration or for remuneration that is disproportionately low.

In the second case, a reasonable remuneration is deemed owed as between the creditor and the recipient of the work. All circumstances are weighed, expressly including family relationships and the economic capacity of the business. For family firms in which relatives help out for little money, this is the most delicate provision of the whole chapter.

Sometimes a different letter arrives before the order: the preliminary garnishment under section 845. A creditor who already holds an enforceable title has the bailiff notify the employer that a garnishment is imminent and call on it to stop paying the debtor.

Under subsection 2 this notice has the effect of an attachment, provided the garnishment is effected within one month; the period runs from the day of service. For payroll this means a preliminary garnishment must be taken seriously even though no court order is on the desk yet.

The garnishee statement: fourteen days, three questions

When applying, the creditor usually knows little about the employment. Section 840 therefore gives the creditor a right to information against the employer. At the creditor's request, the garnishee must make certain statements to the creditor within two weeks, counted from service of the garnishment order.

Under subsection 2 the request must be included in the certificate of service. Whoever receives the certificate can thus see on it whether a statement has been requested. It pays not to file that sheet away but to pass it on, together with the order, to whoever is responsible.

• whether and to what extent the employer acknowledges the wage claim as well founded and is prepared to pay
• whether and what claims other persons are making on the wage claim, for instance under an assignment
• whether and for which claims the wages have already been garnished for other creditors

Items 4 and 5 of the provision concern garnished bank balances and are addressed to banks. For an employer only the first three questions matter. They do not call for a payslip, but they do call for a clear answer: is there an employment relationship, are wages owed under it, and who got there first?

The period is short and is calculated under the rules of the Civil Code, to which section 222(1) of the Code of Civil Procedure refers. Under section 187(1) of the Civil Code the day of service is not counted. Under section 188(2) a period in weeks ends when the day bearing the same name as the day of service expires.

If that end falls on a Saturday, a Sunday or a general public holiday, section 222(2) of the Code of Civil Procedure moves it to the end of the next working day. If the order is served on a Tuesday, the period therefore ends on the Tuesday two weeks later, unless that day is a public holiday.

The statement is addressed to the creditor. Under subsection 3 it may also be made to the bailiff within the period. If the employer makes it at the moment of service, the bailiff records it in the certificate of service, and the garnishee signs it there.

What a failure costs

The sanction is contained in a single sentence. Under the second sentence of section 840(2), the garnishee is liable to the creditor for the damage resulting from failure to meet its obligation. This is neither a fine nor a coercive penalty but compensation, measured by what the silence has actually cost the creditor.

The statute does not put a figure on that damage. The obvious case is a creditor who, relying on there being garnishable wages, incurs effort that a timely answer would have spared. Whoever stays silent leaves the creditor to make assumptions, and those assumptions rarely favour the business.

The duty is to answer the questions. An answer that conceals a known assignment or omits an earlier garnishment does not answer them. Care costs less here than any later dispute, because the information comes from the business's own records anyway.

This risk is not the same as the risk of a wrong payment. The statement is information; paying over the garnishable amount is a separate duty arising from the order itself. An employer who replies on time but keeps transferring the full wage to the employee has met one duty and breached the other.

Conversely, flawless wage calculations do not make up for a missed statement. Both duties run in parallel, and both start with the same event, service. It helps to run them in parallel organisationally too: one deadline for the statement, one note for the next payroll run.

A simple way of working follows from this. A garnishment order does not belong in the personnel file but on the desk of the person responsible for the next payroll run, with the date of service and the calculated deadline on top. In a small firm that is often the owner, in a larger one the payroll office.

When several creditors garnish

Employees in debt rarely receive just one order. The ranking follows a strict time principle. Under section 804(3) of the Code of Civil Procedure the lien created by an earlier garnishment takes precedence over the lien created by a later one. Whoever garnished first is paid first, whatever the size of the claim.

Earlier here means served earlier. Because under section 829(3) the garnishment is effected by service on the garnishee, the date of service on the employer decides, not the date of the court order. A small creditor served early displaces a large creditor whose order arrives later.

The lower-ranking creditor does not go away empty-handed; it waits. As long as the garnishable amount flows entirely to the first creditor, the second receives nothing; once the first claim is paid off, it moves up. Payroll needs a list showing date of service, creditor, outstanding balance and rank.

Where the position is unclear, section 853 offers a way out. If the wages have been garnished for several creditors, the garnishee may deposit the amount with the local court whose order was served on it first, disclosing the situation and handing over the orders.

If a creditor to whom the claim has been transferred demands it, the garnishee must even make the deposit. That is not a failure on the part of the business but the intended way of stepping out of a dispute between several creditors instead of having to decide their ranking itself.

Maintenance creditors are a special case. If a garnishment for maintenance meets an ordinary garnishment, section 850e no. 4 requires that the parts of the income that can only be garnished for maintenance are applied to the maintenance claims first. The second module explains this wider reach.

The execution court makes this allocation on the application of a party. Until such a decision is served on it, the garnishee may pay with discharging effect according to the content of the garnishment orders, assignments and other dispositions known to it. What counts is what it knows, not what it might have guessed.

Two neighbouring topics should not be confused. If a bank account is garnished, the bank is the garnishee, and the account holder can demand under section 850k that the account be kept as a garnishment protection account. That account garnishment has nothing to do with the employer's payroll calculation.

If the employee goes through insolvency proceedings with discharge of residual debt, her garnishable earnings may have been assigned to a trustee, who then takes the place of individual creditors. The course on insolvency explains that procedure; the calculation of the garnishable amount remains the one set out in the second module.